Wage Labor Update

Be sure to check out Sociological Images‘ post on “Low-Wage Work in the U.S.,” which aggregates some good statistics about that topic.

Perhaps the most interesting part:

Finally, over at the Economic Policy Institute blog, David Cooper posted a table that provides an overview of the demographics of those who would be affected if Congress passed Senator Tom Harkin’s proposed bill that would raised the minimum wage to $9.80/hour:

Any legislation in Congress that has even a snowball’s chance in hell of helping the working class economically is almost certainly not going to pass. But a minimum wage hike looks to me to have a better chance than most bills, and if it helped almost 30 million individuals, even just a little bit, that could be a huge victory given the constraints of the current legislative climate. Better yet would be a bill that indexed that minimum wage to inflation or the cost of living, but these days even that seems a bit too much to hope for.